In the second half of the twentieth century, Japan quietly became one of the great guitar-making nations. It happened through small workshops, a handful of exceptional teachers, and a generation of craftsmen who studied the Spanish tradition with an almost forensic seriousness and then applied to it a standard of finish the Spanish workshops had never attempted. Shunsuke Yokoo belongs near the top of that generation. He learned from the most celebrated Japanese maker of them all, built under his own name for more than fifty years, and left behind concert instruments that players still describe as among the finest to come out of Japan.

Under Masaru Kohno

Yokoo was born in 1946, into a Japan still in the earliest stages of postwar reconstruction. In 1964, at eighteen, he began studying guitar making under Masaru Kohno — and it is difficult to overstate what an extraordinary place that was to be standing at that particular moment.

Kohno was then on the verge of becoming the most internationally recognised guitar maker in Japanese history. In 1967, three years into Yokoo's training, Kohno entered the international guitar-making competition at Liège in Belgium, where instruments were judged anonymously with the makers' labels removed, and took the gold medal for sound. The silver went to the French luthier Daniel Friederich. It was the result that announced Japanese lutherie to the world, and Yokoo was in the workshop while it happened.

He was not the only significant maker to pass through those doors. Kohno's nephew Masaki Sakurai trained there too, and would eventually succeed to the workshop after Kohno's death in 1998. The lineage that runs out of that small Tokyo shop accounts for a remarkable proportion of the best Japanese classical guitars ever built.

His Own Workshop

Yokoo established the Yokoo Guitar Studio and began building under his own name in the late 1960s — most accounts give 1967, though some place the founding as late as 1972. He settled in Saitama, the prefecture immediately north of Tokyo, and it is where every guitar bearing his name was built for the next five decades.

What he took from Kohno was not a template to be copied but a set of standards: the Spanish construction principles that underpin the concert guitar, executed with a precision of fit and finish that became the defining characteristic of the Japanese school. What he added over fifty years was his own voice.

The Instruments

Yokoo built classical concert guitars, in small numbers, entirely by hand. The specification is consistent across the range and speaks of a maker with access to superb materials and no interest in compromising them.

Soundboards are high-grade solid German spruce. Backs and sides are rosewood — Indian on many instruments, but the finest examples use Central and South American rosewood of a quality that players regularly mistake for Brazilian, and genuine Brazilian appears on the older guitars built before the trade restrictions came into force. Necks are mahogany, fingerboards ebony, nuts and saddles bone. The scale is the standard 650 mm with a 52 mm nut, though he built to order and shorter 630 mm scales exist for players who wanted them.

Internally the bracing is a complex arrangement built on a nine-fan scheme — considerably more elaborate than the classic seven-fan Spanish pattern, and characteristic of a maker chasing evenness and control across the whole soundboard rather than raw power in one register.

Older instruments frequently carry a cashew lacquer finish, a traditional Japanese material derived from cashew nut shell and used as a substitute for true urushi lacquer. It is a distinctly Japanese touch on an otherwise Spanish design, and it is one of the small signatures that makes guitars of this era and origin recognisable.

The Models

Yokoo named his models rather than relying only on numbers, and the names recur across the decades of his output:

• Prelude — a concert-class instrument, and one of the most sought-after of his named models
• Fantasi — built in small numbers and rarely seen
• Poem — among his finest work; a 2002 example carried a list price of 600,000 yen
• Grave — including custom-specification instruments with shorter scale lengths
• Numbered models — earlier professional-grade guitars, such as the No. 20 of the late 1970s and early 1980s, built with solid top, back and sides and finished in cashew lacquer

Output was small. In his later years an order placed directly with him meant a wait of six months or more, at around 440,000 yen — the economics of a man building a limited number of instruments a year by hand, with no interest in scaling up.

The Sound

Players who have spent time with Yokoo's guitars describe them in remarkably consistent terms. The voice is often called piano-like: dense, clear, precisely articulated, with basses that punch without blurring and trebles that are simultaneously crystalline and strong. Volume and sustain are concert-grade, but the character is organic rather than forced — the instrument gives up its power willingly instead of having to be driven.

The quality most often singled out is note separation. In dense contrapuntal writing the individual lines stay individually audible, which is the mark of a soundboard whose graduation and bracing have been controlled with real precision.

That last quality is worth dwelling on, because it is the through-line of the whole Japanese school — and it is exactly what the nine-fan bracing pattern is for. Clarity in these guitars is not a happy accident of a good top. It is engineered.

Death and Succession

Shunsuke Yokoo died in January 2023, at the age of seventy-six, having built under his own name for well over half a century.

The workshop did not close with him. His son Masato Yokoo, a prominent maker in his own right, now leads the Yokoo Guitar Studio and continues the work — the same pattern of succession that carried Kohno's own workshop forward through Masaki Sakurai a quarter of a century earlier.

What Shunsuke left behind is a body of instruments that has become progressively harder to find. He was never a high-volume maker, his best guitars used woods that are now restricted or simply unavailable, and the generation of Japanese luthiers he belonged to has largely retired or passed away. Guitars from that era and that standard were undervalued for a long time. They are not undervalued any more.

Why Yokoo Matters

• Born in 1946 and trained from 1964 under Masaru Kohno, the most internationally celebrated Japanese guitar maker of the century
• Was in the Kohno workshop in 1967, the year Kohno took the gold medal for sound at the blind-judged Liège competition
• Founded the Yokoo Guitar Studio in Saitama in the late 1960s and built there for more than fifty years
• Built concert classical guitars entirely by hand, in small numbers, to a consistently high specification
• Used high-grade German spruce soundboards with rosewood back and sides, mahogany necks, ebony fingerboards and bone nuts
• Employed a complex nine-fan bracing scheme, more elaborate than the traditional Spanish seven-fan pattern
• Known models include the Prelude, Fantasi, Poem and Grave, alongside earlier numbered professional instruments
• Died in January 2023; the workshop continues under his son, the luthier Masato Yokoo

There is a version of guitar history that treats the Spanish workshops as the source and everyone else as an imitator. Yokoo's career is a useful corrective. He learned a Spanish design from a Japanese master who had beaten the Spanish and French makers at their own anonymous competition, then spent fifty years refining it in a small studio north of Tokyo, chasing a clarity of voice that the tradition he inherited had never quite prioritised in the same way. The result is not a Spanish guitar built in Japan. It is a Japanese concert guitar — and the distinction is audible the moment you play one.

A history of the Japanese luthier Shunsuke Yokoo, his training under Masaru Kohno, and the concert guitars he built in Saitama